Irma is Most Recent Stop for ‘Adrenaline Junkies’ of Disaster Rescue Team

MIAMI — The rescuers from California Task Force 1 had finally dried out. They had waded in the floodwaters left by Hurricane Harvey in southeast Texas. They had slept in stalls ordinarily used for horses, and two of the task force’s men had survived being suctioned through a large pipe.

But as the search-and-rescue team of about 70 — including swimmers, canine handlers, doctors, communications specialists and even a structural engineer — reached El Paso, commanders received a new order: Turn everyone around, and head toward an increasingly menacing Hurricane Irma.

“We’re just firemen,” Mark Akahoshi, a leader of the task force, said later over a late-night package of Oreos in the Florida Keys.

He thought for another beat or two: “You know what we really are? Adrenaline junkies. We could sit here, and every time that alarm goes off, everybody perks up.”

The powerful hurricanes that crashed into the Florida and Texas coasts this summer left billions of dollars in damage and led to at least 110 deaths in the continental United States. But the storms also offered glimpses into a little-noticed arm of the nation’s disaster response system: the network of 28 urban search-and-rescue teams that the Federal Emergency Management Agency can send into crisis zones.

FEMA said it had mobilized all 28 of the task forces to respond to Hurricane Harvey, the first instance that the entire network had been used for a single disaster since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. For Hurricane Irma, the federal and state authorities relied on 22 of the task forces. California Task Force 1, which is affiliated with the Los Angeles Fire Department, and FEMA allowed a New York Times reporter and photographer to embed with the unit for five days during its deployment to Florida.

Predictions and Perils

ORLANDO, Fla. — Only crumbles of cheese pizza and chocolate cupcakes were left on the Sunday night dinner plates when Dr. Fran Vogler posed a question to her tablemates: “What do we do about the pythons?”

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Dr. Gregory Palmer, a member of the task force, at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Fla.CreditSam Hodgson for The New York Times

There were murmurs about antivenom and the availability of medical evacuations. Chuck Ruddell, a longtime member of the task force, heard them out. Then he offered a not entirely convincing prescription: “You’ve just got to keep your eyes open.”

These were what counted as down days for the task force. Sheltered inside a convention center, they could do little more than consider and prepare for Irma. They spread out maps of Florida cities and studied the state’s history with hurricanes by reviewing 25-year-old photographs of Hurricane Andrew’s devastation. Some talked about the risks for sinkholes.

Mr. Ruddell, a charismatic captain with a worn face and raspy voice, kept telling the team to expect the worst.

Most members of the task force slept in one room, newly filled with clean clothes after a rare run to a laundromat. The commanders slept in another, but not before working late into the night, watching CNN and tracking the storm as it teetered farther west.

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Team members discussed logistics as they waited in Orlando.CreditSam Hodgson for The New York Times

Late Sunday, as Irma raged around the Orlando area, the task force received word that it would be sent to the Florida Keys. Get your packs together to survive for 72 hours, the members were told.

Most of the rescuers were up by dawn Monday. But before they left, they gathered in one of their meeting rooms, now emptied of the sleeping bags and cots they had hauled in. Many bowed their heads and closed their eyes in prayer. It was Sept. 11, the 16th anniversary of another East Coast crisis to which the task force had responded.

A Drive in Daylight and Darkness

SUMMERLAND KEY, Fla. — Boy Scouts usually fill the bunk beds here. They show up in the Keys for programs built around what this region is rightly famous for: salty air, sunny skies and pristine turquoise waters.

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The team in its command center at the Boy Scout camp.CreditSam Hodgson for The New York Times

But late on Monday night, the firefighters invaded the closed Scout camp.

They had been on the move for about 12 hours, stopping once at a gas station without power in Palm City, where task force members had bought snacks from a clerk forced to use a calculator instead of a cash register. A plan to set up at Homestead Air Reserve Base, near Miami, had been shelved. So, too, had a proposal for Key Largo and the airport in Marathon. The parking lot of a grocery store had been similarly vetoed.

The task force’s planners always found some concern: too much standing water, too little security, too far from the group’s expected theater of operations. The local authorities finally proposed the Scout base, about 24 miles from the end of U.S. Highway 1.

The convoy, its occupants having crossed Seven Mile Bridge and marveled at the stars above, arrived on a clear night in the far-darker-than-normal Keys. It was late. There was work to do anyway.

“I want to get this dorm opened up,” said Brian LaBrie, one of the group’s logistics planners, as commanders assigned tasks. “I want to get those storm windows open. I want generators and lights over there, and all the fans we can find in that one dorm.”

One man shouted guidance about removing storm windows — “those things are expensive” — to firefighters accustomed to entering buildings with axes. Some played a motorized game of Tetris, figuring out how to squeeze vans, big rigs and boats into a tight parking area. A truck driver who moonlights as an electrician rigged the team’s generator into the complex’s electrical system and switched on the air-conditioning, improving on Mr. LaBrie’s directions.

Restrooms remained primitive. But within hours, the mess hall, decorated with Scout patches from across the country, became a command post. Communications in one section. Planning and operations in another. Briefcases were stuffed amid stored kayaks.

A section of picnic tables became a place for meals and briefings. By the end of the night, Mr. LaBrie was talking about how to bring in showers the next day.

Getting to bed was another matter. Two firefighters were waiting on the landing of the stairway to the bunk beds. One held a brush, another a nozzle. To go to sleep, you had to be decontaminated.

Street by Street

BIG PINE KEY, Fla. — The rescuers’ boots slipped into the mud, silty and silver-hued. They limboed beneath power lines suddenly slung low. A snake slithered into the shade of felled trees and shredded siding.

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Debris left by the storm in Big Pine Key.CreditSam Hodgson for The New York Times

“Fire department!” the men shouted again and again, their voices echoing off the houses that, at least on Mary Road, returned only silence.

They sometimes rapped on doors, pounded on storm shutters, tried doors and peered into windows. On this key, at least, there was no need for the water rescues or helicopter-based heroics that had unfolded so often in Texas.

What Big Pine Key required was people walking, house by house, block by block, marking where people still were. The Californians marched down streets like No Name Road and Gumbo Limbo Street and sweated through their shirts — long sleeve, for safety reasons — by midmorning. They rested in shaded carports and went through bag after bag of Goldfish and trail mix.

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John Booth, left, who rode out the storm on Big Pine Key, spoke to a task force member.CreditSam Hodgson for The New York Times

Every home was evaluated, but not all received the close-up scrutiny of what the team referred to as a primary search. Java and the task force’s other search dogs were only summoned occasionally.

“If we were trying to break in every one to do primary, we’d never complete our mission,” said Ryan Primosch, a rescue squad officer. The task force’s members, Mr. Primosch said, must rely on a blend of instinct and sight to narrow their priorities.

“Is there a car in the driveway?” he said, audibly running through a mental checklist as he approached yet another house. “Is there a generator running? Are the windows blown out?”

But Mr. Primosch knew their searches would only turn up so much.

“At some point, they’re going to find a fatality that we didn’t find at first,” he said, as he searched another battered street. “It’s going to be the neighbors that find that. We just can’t do it all.”

The Only Help

LITTLE TORCH KEY, Fla. — “Today is going to be like yesterday: hot and humid,” a member of the task force announced in a studied deadpan at a briefing on Wednesday morning.

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Manny Castaneda tried to cool off during a search of Little Torch Key.CreditSam Hodgson for The New York Times

“That’s some good intel right there,” said a voice from the picnic tables.

But these sessions were serious affairs, revealing details of search plans and including reminders to hydrate, and then hydrate some more. The briefings, though, could only hint so much at what the rescuers found on the devastated streets of the Keys: torn-apart homes, loose pets and bewildered, terrified, unnerved residents.

For almost all of them, the task force members were the first government representatives they had seen since Irma hit Florida on Sept. 10. So they spilled out their frustrations and fears, some of which involved debris removal or abandoned cars, but most of which dealt with looting.

“We have people on our property trying to steal,” Shanin Ourada, 35, told Mr. Primosch. “I just hate to survive the hurricane and then die from some robber.”

With the local authorities stretched thin, Mr. Primosch had few answers beyond suggesting the hurried creation of a neighborhood watch. “I hear you,” he replied. “There are thousands of people out here who are experiencing the same thing, so it’s tough to be everywhere. We’re from the fire branch, so we’re just, ‘Who’s here? Do you need immediate life-or-death assistance? Are you staying here?’”

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Ryan Primosch led a search mission through the debris in Little Torch Key.CreditSam Hodgson for The New York Times

Ms. Ourada nodded.

There were other forms of counseling. In the kitchen of one house on Big Pine Key, Mike Kammerer took a man’s information so a medical team could try to help him get more medicine. On the way to the Keys, some on the task force had offered roadside assistance to a family close to home, but not quite there.

They could only do so much. They knew they would be leaving within days.

Many said they never expected to return to the Keys, unless another hurricane struck.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Rescuers Far From Home Come to Florida’s Aid. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe